Promoted Content (boosted posts) now make up 34% of the LinkedIn feed, while LinkedIn Ads make up another 13%, according to the latest research from Just Connecting’s Algorithm Research report. That means nearly half of posts appearing in users’ feeds are paid.
Organic content, particularly posts from Company Pages (making up just 2% of the feed as of November 2024), is subject to lower and lower visibility as LinkedIn shifts to a paid-first content promotion strategy.
As LinkedIn continues to reduce the reach of unpaid posts, running ads or promoting content with the “boost” feature are great ways to expand shrinking reach on LinkedIn.
Promoting Content with the “Boost” Feature
Promoting content is a simple way to get started using your existing Company Page Posts. With this method, you don’t need to create new or different content for an ad. Your organic post essentially becomes an ad as a boosted post.
And since these posts make up the majority of users’ feeds, Promoted Content may be the simplest and most effective way to reach a wider audience on LinkedIn.
Navigate to your Page posts, and select the Boost button.
You’ll be prompted to select your objective. You can choose to drive more traffic to your page and get clicks to your landing page, get more impressions by increasing awareness, get more engagement, or get more leads with a lead form.
Typically, getting the maximum number of impressions is our primary objective with organic posts, so choosing “Increase awareness of your post” would be a good place to start.
From here, you can choose audience attributes such as locations, industries, job titles, and more.
We recommend disabling audience expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network.
You’ll need to run the Boost for at least 2 days, with a minimum budget of $10/day.
You’re boosted post is up and running in no time at all!
Why Use Traditional Ads vs. Boosted Posts?
Since using the Boost feature is so simple, and boosted posts show up more than traditional ads on LinkedIn, you may be wondering why you’d even bother with traditional ads.
With traditional LinkedIn Ads, you can get much more targeted with your audience, even targeting specific companies or user attributes. You can also set a manual bidding strategy which will be more cost effective. And you can test multiple ad creatives (both graphics and text), track conversions, and a whole lot more.
These fancy features will require more work to set up, but depending on your goals and your team’s capabilities, it may be worthwhile.
How To Set Up LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are composed of Campaign Groups, Campaigns, and Ads.
Setting Up A Campaign Group
Here’s an example of what it looks like to set up a Campaign Group. Right off the bat, you can set more objectives for your Ads than you could for a Boosted post.
Setting Up a Campaign
Once you have your Campaign Group set up, it’s time to set up a Campaign within that Campaign Group.
Here is where you can begin to get even more advanced with audience targeting.
You can upload a list to target, or retarget people based on past Campaign activity.
And, you can select specific audience attributes such as company, education, and even interests and traits.
You can set up a manual bidding strategy to choose how much you pay for your optimization goal. This is key when you’re running a campaign centered around getting leads.
You can also add conversion tracking and URL tracking parameters to your ads.
Within the Campaign settings, you’ll also choose your Ad format.
You can only choose one type of Ad format for each Campaign. We recommend setting up multiple Campaigns under one Campaign Group so you can try out various Ad formats.
Setting Up Ads
Now, you can set up a number of different Ads within your Campaign.
Even within one single ad, you can upload multiple images to test which ad creative performs the best.
As you can see, the LinkedIn Ads platform is very feature-rich and highly customizable to your goals.
LinkedIn Ads Resources
Check out our blog post here for a more detailed tutorial on how to set up a LinkedIn Ad.
If you’re ready to set up your ads, but aren’t sure which Campaign Group Objective to start with, check out our blog post on How To Create a LinkedIn Ad Strategy.
Wondering what to expect from LinkedIn Ads? Review these LinkedIn Ads benchmarks as you set goals for your ad campaigns, and check out our case study here.
Conclusion
Whether you choose to simply Boost existing content from your Company Page or decide to go deeper with highly targeted ads, LinkedIn is a great platform to reach new people with your products or services.